


overflow the night

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Eye Trauma, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-14 03:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4548354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: Túrin saves Finduilas. Things do not go well. But I mean, like, also not terribly?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the wayward

Beleg had asked him, once: “When are you blind?”

“When I sleep,” Túrin had said. “And—when I wear hoods. And it doesn’t matter how good I think my peripheral-vision-through-wool is.” He held up two fingers, and crooked a third in the preparatory hope that some profound and elvish entry would come to him before he opened his mouth. “When I… swim…?”

“Only because you insist on closing your eyes underwater,” said Beleg, unmoved. “Think. I’m talking about combat. Land-based combat.”

The patent unfairness of the question gave Túrin a furtive thrill. It meant fumbling through the dark, sans inspiration; it also meant a chance to impress his teacher.

“Depends on the land,” he tried. “If there’s cover, you sacrifice visibility, and then—”

“Too clever,” said Beleg. Defeat? But Túrin was cushioned by the spaciousness of this testing maze, the vague wide halls, far from any proof of his failure. “Try again. What about when you blink?”

“Oh, _that_.” Oh, that! Not so far after all. Here was the dead end. Túrin spoke with what would have been scorn if it had been even half-hearted; at the very least, he was recovering from his embarrassment, faster than it could spread. Defiance, unopposed, turned to useless pride, and in the same way all his strength ran amok in Doriath, where he could not seem to whittle a rose without piercing the stem.

But those were things he decided later. Just then, he regretted his rudeness, but felt compelled to add:

“It’s not true. I blink so fast, it’s like—” He practiced a little to reassure himself, to studious silence from Beleg. “Everything shrinks. But it doesn’t stop.”

It crossed his mind that perhaps elves didn’t have the trick of it. They blinked less frequently than men, and had less motive to be timely.

“No,” said Beleg, cutting short the burgeoning pity in Túrin’s breast. “That’s not a bad description of the effect. But you’ve watched other people. Their eyes are really closed, aren’t they? If only for a second?”

“Half a second,” said Túrin, stubbornly.

“A tenth of that!” said Beleg. “But the world has changed in less time.” He beckoned Túrin closer. There was a serious pledge hooked on the barb of his frown. Túrin leaned in, and Beleg snapped two fingers under his nose.

"Gah!"

“What you _see,_ between light and light, is the mind’s attempt at salvage. It bridges the chasm, but lacks the knowledge to seal it up.”

“…So my mind is truly _of the Edain, and not the Eldar_ ,” said Túrin, slowly, using Saeros’s second-favorite phrase. He was thinking of the earthworks at Menegroth, which changed the figure of the hills: though within the Girdle they were rather concerned with opening fissures than filling them. Beleg caught the image, which had been intended for him, and smiled. The echo of Saeros’s heavy intonation he ignored.

“Surely,” he said. “What else should it be? But my analogy failed, if from it you deduce that my people are immune. We blink, and you blink—and blinking is just one example of what I mean, and you find it a trivial one, not without reason. I might have done better to ask what you see in the corner of your eye—even unhooded!

“But the lesson is this: your reason tries to aid you. It sands down the shadows, it invents a slender crossing. And if the world ever seems cramped or faded—even briefly! even for a blink—it may be that you’re not looking with your eyes: which, whatever their flaws, work and fail at the same resolution.” (A Valarin word. Beleg thrust the sense of it into his head, using a jointed flutter of sun-ringed leaves, like mail.) “The easy understanding which strips the depth from beauty, and shortens pain—that is the vision of thought. You can’t trust such help.”

“Ever?”

“Sometimes. Now! Pick up thy bow!”

He came to remember the turn of that exchange, not as advice, but as an explanation. So _that_ was why the sky was as if barred with filmy darkness. Not when he looked at it, no, not on the open heath; but when he called it up in mind? In secret places, wishing to banish his disquiet? Blue broke like its image on water, to encompass black wilds.

Because he was blind. And because he bridged too much. It was his mind that was to blame, when the days of the hunt twisted together, and memories of Nargothrond’s fall ran beside him, catching hold of his cloak—eager to hang themselves, not from their due place on the bough, but on the hooks and twigs of barren hours, yesterday, the red dawn—on the slender, pliant shoots of fast repose still in the growing, which could not bear the weight. How he hated it: waking convinced of the sound of the flames. And was comforted, too, as Beleg had promised, by the thinness of being, stretched to fold atop his grief.

He trusted that the slide would end when he found Finduilas. _She alone stands between you and your doom_ , Gwindor said, dying, and Túrin was inclined to take him at his word, who had never recommended Mormegil to Finduilas’s care in life. He thought of her often on the eastern road: her smile when he spoke to her of the things of men, and the coils of her hair, like a wealth that he had known was destroyed, and which fate now presented to him as a kindly afterthought. For your trouble, son of Húrin: five pounds of the dead’s curls. Your sister’s weregild, planted, and grown to a red hoard.

The orcs outpaced him. He had lost time in Nargothrond; had dreamt awhile in the grip of strange pain, and awoken after two or three days of fever, healed of a wound he couldn’t remember receiving, famished and whole amid the stink of death. What power it was that had guarded him from Glaurung and the departing legions, he didn’t know, or care to guess. Doom mouthed him like a sweet and spit him out against a later spike in appetite. He wished to cheat it, that was all. Maybe Finduilas could turn him bitter.

He began to find bodies. Women he had known by the light of their jewels, underground, lay stripped and silent in a trampled field. The orcs guessed that they were pursued. If she dies, he thought, what will I do? And he laughed, and said aloud, “Return to Doriath?”

But she was never among them. Nor did he hear her voice, as he had heard Beleg’s voice, and Forweg’s; so that he thought it must be somewhere else, anchored to the body, and she yet with a use for it.

*

“We would have tried to free the captives,” Dorlas told him, when the fighting was done. “We are not so far fallen as to let the North’s petty-thieves pass unharried. We meant to waylay them at the Crossings of Taeglin, before they passed into the wood.”

Except that fear of the Mormegil had driven the orcs faster than woodsmen could account for; and few archers were near enough to the Crossings to attempt the planned ambush. Their efforts only served to persuade the troop's leaders that Túrin had found allies. The orcs charged forth in a panic. They made the bridge at Celebros, and ventured higher, deeper, straying toward Amon Obel. The men of Brethil who had been assembling near the banks were forced to loop back and give desperate chase. They had some success But a shattered vanguard, driving the prisoners before them, reached the hill.

There orcs had torn holes in the palisade, killed half the scanty remaining defenders, and tried to burn the town. Dorlas said: It was as if fate would unmake us. Túrin at that would have grimaced, and then perhaps explained; but long familiarity with the curvature of his deeds had left him unable to react with natural horror. Instead he heard the tale out in silence, as he would an apology from someone who had wronged him.

But certainly when he arrived on the heels of the vanguard he did not resent Brethil's new weakness; except insofar as he pitied the women and children caught up in the fray. That was a pity as bated as the fire that ate through the thatch on their homes. Pale and transparent, in the daylight of his hope.

He fought a few minutes beneath the walls, then circled round to the far side of the settlement. Those few resourceful orcs who had gotten past the stockade were not good candidates to have preserved a prisoner. They were obeying directives which had little to do with their mission, or with an untainted animal’s duty of survival. They swarmed to loot and to kill. If Finduilas was alive, she would be with one of the saner specimens. Something still capable of reasoning, that wished to bargain with its masters.

He had been taught, many times over, how to listen. His pulse rang in his ears: but that could be unpeeled from the web of outside sound. And as he fared deeper through the birch wood, he heard her. A faint sob.

She had been thrown up against the bole of a tree, and the orcs’ captain, armed with one half a broken halberd, was whispering something in her furled ear. The point dented her neck. She had turned her head away, and Túrin saw as though at the bottom of a glass the tiny creases that imposed some feeling on the mask: so that although her lips had thinned, her eyes shut, her cheeks drawn in as though to suck the bane from bitten air, the folds at the corner of eye and mouth suggested a quite different relaxation—even relief. They hung in order. His only hope was to remain still, until the captain withdrew a bare inch.

The captain shook her. His curses had grown urgent. Túrin could almost follow the words. Finduilas stirred from whatever trance she had succumbed to, and blue eyes—Orodreth’s same wet, broken-stone eyes—rose and found Túrin.

All peace or solace ran from her small face. An almost vertiginous loss: as if the land had tipped forward to empty itself. She straightened, with little regard for the spear, and wrapped an arm around the captain’s neck, grace that once served to soothe her lover. Only when her hand curved up did he see how it shone.

He ran. His presence, or the orc’s concept of it, was no longer the greatest threat to her safety. But the thing in her hand drove in. It drifted, almost, sheathed in lead-gray flesh. What was it? A brooch? The captain stiffened. She had the frightened, absent air of one who acts according to an overheard instruction; she had struck at random, perhaps, and struck the spine. In another moment Túrin was dragging the body off of her—the body, still-living, convulsed, and the oversized head tossed suggestively. Toward him, toward Finduilas. Seeming to say: And then?

He ran it through. Then dropped it, on the sward.

“You came,” she said, shaking her sleeves out to cover her wrists, and drawing smooth the silk. “I knew you would. Mormegil!” She looked at the ground, at the corpse, and at him. Something new eased in the cast of her movements: not the imposed calm of her graven surrender, but a deliberate lowering, an opening. The deeper freedom, as he deemed: though also the more fragile, because it was so conscious.

He took her arm. “I did,” he agreed, trying to speak lightly, and to disguise the fond impatience that collapsed on him in waves. “And would have come in vain, but for the feats of Finduilas.” She started, and he drew her closer to him, touching her at the elbow and beneath her wrist. He wished to impart some milled-fine portion of the frenzied, approximate joy he felt, which otherwise seemed clumsy, in the face of her distress.

“The town?” she asked, craning to see.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes.”

It transpired that the town had survived. At least, enough of it had done so to want tending. He went down and spoke to them, and those who had seen him fight asked him to stay for as long as he could. Finduilas was also welcomed: their chieftain and healer, Brandir son of Handir, had been cut down on his doorstep, and though Finduilas was little versed in the treatment of mortal wounds, she was able to do more for the worst-injured than either she or Túrin had expected; she sang, silvery and flattened, and pain fled. One woman had burns down both flanks, and a crushed leg from where she had been trapped between fallen timbers: she said, “Oh, sunlight.”

So they were sheltered and fed. And almost immediately after the corpses had been dragged from the paths, autumn levered its bulk off the land, as a sleeper roused by cold; and body and color went first from the ground, and then from the tips of the trees, and then receded beyond the reach of Anor. Winter picked the village up and shook it like a bell: removing it utterly from its mount on the hill, and seeing what pure tones it made in conference with itself. Or so it seemed to Túrin. A privacy and containment that persisted even as he, more often than the other hunters, dared the white abyss beyond the treeline, and searched for the trails of escaped orcs and the survivors of Nargothrond. He found no one; found nothing; shot partridges that sprayed from the snow like chips hammered off marble. They did not have much need of game. The attack, lunging after the very tail of the harvest, had left cellars and smokehouse overstocked, and the funeral feasts were lavish from a strange necessity: spread with perishables that would have fed half again their meager number.

He liked it. He felt with sharp insistence the value of an isolation that was not voluntary, and which was shaped in blows rather than hovering restraint. In Nargothrond the stone had been carved, and the loam shifted, in such a way that the roof poured weight into the low bowed walls, and would not so much as brush your scalp or spill an ounce of dust. The pillars were beautiful. Nothing was held off by his lone strength: the earth enclosed him without touching him, could have mastered him, and forbore. In return it had asked an obedience that he had not understood, let alone…

But here. He went out, and the wind tussled with him like a child, while light and snow hid his surroundings equally. There was no impression of coyness, or the future peering in through a tunnel’s mouth; instead the sun and the blank underside of the horizon had been rolled close to satisfy. He was beaten back. He traveled, if not far, then a tangled distance in advances and retreats.

Finduilas had less joy of it. Elves bore cold badly; he recalled how Beleg—even Beleg!—had complained during fanged northern evenings, and she was a king’s daughter, born to wear linen heated on the hearth before she woke. He would have taken her to Doriath if he’d thought she would survive the trek. “My father’s father’s mother’s uncle,” she said, when he proposed it. “Yes. Close kin.”

But after a time she grew stronger, or else less taxed. It became fashionable among the mothers of Brethil to let her play nursemaid to older children; the theory seemed to be that she would teach them patience and wisdom, and conceivably perfect pitch. Mainly she indulged their every spoken whim, and watched the resultant havoc in bafflement. Often Túrin returned from his ventures to find the hut they had been granted—a barren, snug, sweet-smelling cabin, not steeped in the previous habitant’s absence but wearing it as a patchy residue: which promised that their absence, too, would rub off in its time—overrun with small wars; and Finduilas in her wicker chair poring over the chaos. Not distantly, but with the helpless interest of a woman before a mirror, aware that nothing fundamental could be changed. Admiring it, because nothing could be changed.

He separated the worst cases with an arm or a leg, and spoke to her softly, until she smiled at him and said something pertinent about his people’s vigor.

He wondered whether she had known anyone younger than she was, before him. That was folly: even he had seen children in Nargothrond sometimes. Elves his age and half his height. And she had gone everywhere that he was not permitted; she was the princess, she had been well-loved.

One day soon after the solstice she joined him on an expedition for kindling. They had had a rare stretch of clear weather; they believed it was a sign the worst was past. She strapped on snowshoes, and floundered after him until they reached a stand of birches, distinguished from near neighbors by the holly that fanned at their feet. There every leaf produced a tithe of slush for the frost-king’s inspection; every leaf had a fold in it like narrow hands close-cupped. No berries yet. The snow, in knurled clumps, on the scale of fish roe, assumed velvet logic, fierce at the outlines and dimmer deeper in. With trepidation, Túrin considered Finduilas’s profile: a flake of bone. Swiping at the sun. Its whiteness was of an intensity that mimed what color mimed; it usurped pigment, among the grays and ivories of that sun-paneled clearing.

Once he had been healed at Ivrin. And now, was he healed? Had he drunk of the pool?

“Holly,” Finduilas announced, and broke off a sprig. “For life. Gwindor told me that.”

It wasn’t what men said.

“Do you think he would have recovered?” she asked.

“What does that mean? Recovered?” he said, uneasily.

“Oh—whatever elves mean by it, I suppose. _In a hundred years, or a thousand…_ ” Another phrase in Quenya, faster than he could follow. His alarm must have shown on his face, because she was charmed, diverted, instantly ready to abandon her thought. “Sometimes I forget that you were reared in Doriath. They say—”

“What did _you_ say?”

She hesitated for longer than translation usually stayed a Noldo. “It would be, ah…” She switched abruptly to her heavily-accented version of his childhood Taliska. “‘Time cures all ills.’ My great-uncle thought it was funny.”

“That’s a Mannish expression!”

“Yes, I think he got it from Bëor, originally. But he misunderstood it the first time, and at court the second meaning was what stuck. I tried to retain—it doesn’t work in Sindarin. It barely works in Quenya. There’s a pun, if you see it. The idea is that time makes some wounds durable, everlasting, that might have gone away if they’d been treated early on.”

The explanation seemed to depress her. He was a little shaken himself. She fell silent, and went back to peeling off the drier branches.

“Treated!” she said, after a while. “Even that’s bad! Why does all your medicine involve pickling?”

“Men have less cause to welcome change,” suggested Túrin, helping her with her armful. 

She was about to acquiesce; then the wind changed, or a leaf fell, and she shook her head. “But in a hundred years things can change for the better, they often do. It’s only when—oh, but why am I talking about this?

“I didn’t mean it that way, anyway, about Gwindor. I meant what you mean. Eventually, his face…”

 _His face_ floated past Túrin’s as on a spike. Scars, furrows, caverns. It had seemed fair enough beside the falls. Túrin was pained by it, and increasingly almost lightheaded from the facility with which she discussed her dead lord, like an eruption of heat that ironed winter out to a painted screen. Pain too made paper. If this was the speech of remembrance, was it possible they were bereaved?

There had been no speculation while Gwindor was alive. She had been nervous, then. Tactful and firm. She hadn't mentioned the future, and she brought the past up only as she would have an unfinished task. A tapestry of reminders, jokes, invoked disputes—their own pattern, small and intricate, which might as easily have described nothing now lost. It disturbed him to think that ingenuous scramble had been the fruit of iron self-control; to see that stillness, curiosity and loathing, were what she was when she let herself rest.

And yet he imagined, or later would say acknowledged, that guilt was the bone of that coaxing question. Would he have recovered? admitted Gwindor was dead, and further that his death had destroyed a large, bright mystery, a substance more ductile than the friend they both well knew. His fossil’s face to peel off in decades, like a scab. And what would emerge? Not youth, surely. The strength to do unimaginable things, which came of living on.

So with doubtful charity, and a mind toward punishment, Túrin said: “Shouldn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Whether he would have been healed. Surely the Golodhrim have studied…”

Another nearly imperceptible head-shake. They might have been at the court of Nargothrond, and she deftly preserving him from some bad indiscretion. He retrieved the picture he had floated words for, as a bloody lure—Gwindor before Orodreth: the way blocked by two spears. _Are these deep places to dungeons turned_? Finduilas ran weeping to the throne.

Now she waded down the slope to scavenge around a dead log. “I didn’t realize the ban was as strictly enforced as that,” he told her, climbing after. “From Gwindor’s welcome, it seemed otherwise.”

“It’s not,” said Finduilas. “But it should be, or what is it for? So we don’t share notes. And to Nargothrond, to the south, few ever came. My father, I think, prided himself on his... But we were not much tested. It's surprising how strong you feel, when no call comes.”

Members of Thingol’s kingdom didn't return at all. Nor did his father, although at Morwen’s house in Dor-lómin it sometimes seemed he was expected. It had never occurred to him to ask the obvious, impossible question, and when he said it now, she didn’t take offense.

“No. And he wasn’t, anyone could see that.” She stared at him, too considerately. “Angband has no security—not for the Noldor, not for skilled workers, who have to be kept sane, released from the fortress to mine, given tools, and weapons…”

“Weapons?”

“Or they make the weapons. Whichever. They’re set to make them, I mean. Gwindor explained it to me. There are escapes every year. And one in ten, one in fifty, is, yes, helpless, and an orc before the flail. But the rest?” She sat down on the log. The bundle of sticks grazed her chin where she bowed her head; it hid her breast, a servant’s frail armor. “You _told_ Gwindor he would be healed,” she said, sleepily.

An accusation, not a conspirator’s whisper. He was glad. “I what?” he said, wondering how she had crept into the dark mesh of the trees. Beyond the clearing, light’s river failed to delve clean rooms. He had thought she would still be a beacon, but it wasn’t like that.

“That was why you were fighting. To give him time to mend.”

“I meant his spirit,” said Túrin, after a moment. “His great courage.”

She gave him a patient look, without comprehension.

That night he lay awake on his pallet beside the fire they had built, while she slept in the cabin’s only bed, muttering and rolling. The fire had guttered almost to nothing, a cluster of holes in black cloth. When he closed his eyes he took no warmth from it. On his back, burdened by inaction—he had been stowed in a dark, rigid craft; it was a box he recognized, it was like waking up. This was what carried him: not his feet, not keen ambition. In the dark, which had one direction, he flowed toward an end.

Gwindor. Once he had stepped over the side of the craft, and met Gwindor. Or so it had seemed. The chatter of the falls, the controlled song. He tried to see, as Finduilas clearly saw, the elf-lord that time owed, hale and brave. The burning chance. And there was Gwindor: crouched on a rock with a lamp in his fist.

Túrin plucked at his makeshift harp. “ _Beleg bold beneath the beeches.._.”

“Too much," Gwindor advised. So Túrin began again.


	2. fireheart

“What is that?” she asked, pointing. There was always some flash. A hole, where the thicket of known words buckled and opened. Or it was a taunt, maybe: a tongue between teeth. That was the life of the world—frustration. What she understood faded, became a dim room, or a wall somehow recessed. What she mistook slithered ahead, ruddy and slow.

_What is that?_

Tirnen would answer, _a lark_. Or, _a yellow morel._ Or, that is Finduilas, Faelivrin Turambar, who has overthrown my doom. As you know very well, Níniel. Did she not bring you to me?

Tirnen meant “the protected.” He had other names. Finduilas called him Mormegil. But Tirnen was what he liked, he answered to it readily.

Nor was he wrong about Finduilas. She was the first person Níniel had seen, on the far side of the river; moving among the trees, she had been a pulse and a murmur of sun. Gold beaded like a welt as she went in, out, under twined branches. And Níniel had crossed over.

There had been—someone like Finduilas. Before. She had woken with nothing; but if there was any shadow of fact in that shaded well, it was a hand pulling hers, and a scent which no—what was the word?—no _human_ had, ancient and green. Like a pine tree: unwithered, and yet endurance chilled its pale sap.

But so: taking mutinous pleasure, as she now did, in tracking herself beneath the eaves of memory—sifting as through an abandoned camp for cinders of true detail, still puffed with the heat that had calved them from the past’s obdurate log—she went on. There had been a collision. Finduilas, shocked, had gripped her forearms, and gathered her into an austere embrace; perhaps because close up there was no room for Níniel to thrash. She had worn a homespun mantle, and where it fell the fabric chafed. Níniel was breathing hard. Panting on Finduilas’s throat—she was the taller, by far, but her knees gave out. Finduilas set a tentative hand to ford the dull waves of her hair. Courageous kindness!

It grew dark. Níniel, without words, had been afraid that time would end: the bay in which, moment by moment, the terrain crashed into focus, brightened, and she learned. She had been afraid, with what must have been a habit of her old intelligence, that this was last. The last. To have found a presence like herself only confirmed her terror: it was a wealth too great, it tokened pity. _Something warm held her._ And then into the blackness, from which she first had slipped.

Even if not, the sky was gray. She sank against Finduilas and she wept.

In fact the storm’s onset disturbed them both, for different reasons. It came out of the south; but that was no longer an earnest of innocence. Therefore Finduilas threw her cloak over Níniel, and led her with all haste to the shelter where she awaited Tirnen, when he hunted. And Tirnen appeared within the hour. He said, What maid is this?

Then nothing. Fever. The south, what was it about the south? They had lost something there, both protected and protector; in the earliest days of Níniel’s education, she thought it was a memory. The only form of loss she recognized: a void so large it felt like the foundation of all plenty. It was under everything—when the sun came back, the green turf, she was sure of it, seeing how they were tugged over night. The rain's black lines, where night clawed through a curtain. Into that grip poured day, and won its shape.

But no, they said. You must have come from somewhere. And we have lost a city, safety, friends. They didn’t reminisce; she became aware they could have. To her amazement, there were swords and terraces, trapped but incorrupt behind their lips. It was as though her friends were not _like_ her, a flood that buried what it touched; they were transparent sheets between heaped wonders and the wastes. Nen Girith—behind the falls—there were windows in the rock; and the children of Brethil spoke of treasure there, robber-caves fenced with mist. What was “treasure”? Like the silk squares that were all that was left of the dress the elf-maid had arrived in. Like that pile of leaves, but cast from metal. When Finduilas bit off a soft sentence to Tirnen about Nargothrond, or _the worm_ —half in jest, Níniel said to herself, ah, the streams have parted. An eyelet opens in sheer water: in the eye, a hoard.

So she took to saying, when she learned new words—I found it. I lost it in my darkness. Were the objects there, as in her teachers’ caves, preserved and very costly? If not as brightly-lit? It was possible. Sometimes it did seem she drew them out, coated in murk.

But every day, it was certain, she knew more of their lives. He said: you teach me to see.

*

Finduilas had cured her of the fever. She had seemed, and been, frightened; Tirnen told Níniel later that elves never met with disease or infection, among their own. What Finduilas sang struck the wrong note. But she also listened; and when her patient cried out, Finduilas answered, in a high stream of sound that made a trench through Níniel. After that, Níniel attributed part of her body to Finduilas. Whatever was clean, whatever was firm, whatever was empty. She never mentioned it: it was an article of faith, not to be tried. Nor did she particularly believe that Finduilas could complete the healing started. Yet she felt an affectionate debt for the unfinished working, and she tended as she could to the loose ends inside herself, combing and straightening, thinking that at another time a friend might come to bind them fast. Also she went to Finduilas as to someone with a stake in her changed body, and a maker’s interest in the tower as it rose.

It was the end of the year. The birches too were ‘yellow morels.’ “Tirnen asked me to marry him,” she said, sitting beside Finduilas on the stoop.

Finduilas was shelling beans. She wasn’t bad at it, or good; she was significantly better than Níniel, who had had to relearn every physical skill she might once have possessed, except how to run. She glanced up at Níniel with a smile that spilled nervousness like breath.

“Again,” Níniel amended, picking up a pod.

There went the smile. “This is… ongoing?” said Finduilas, after a pause.

“The first time I didn’t understand.” She knew about husbands and wives, of course, but their contrivance was another matter. In five years she might have had adolescent examples. Instead she was alone, and Tirnen had fallen to kissing her when she said “What?”

Finduilas was staring at her. Níniel shook off, with brusque resolve, the happiness of his enthusiasm, his admiration; the warm embossment of his lips like a cupped hand to drink from, on her knees. “I told him…” It was hard to speak. She rubbed her mouth, penitent where she had conquered. “I worry. Is it too soon? What can I give him, when I still shake and fall? And he, and he—he leaves, still, and _you_ go, for which I am all grateful, but I never—”

Finduilas took up her wrists with hands still wet from the work. “Ah, Níniel,” she said, “don’t do it to yourself.” Meaning the shaking. But Níniel was calm, and the tender words made her calmer, an irritant swallowed up by smoothness. She began to notice, as in a better light, the roughness of the steps, and ring formed by Finduilas’s fingers, and the clouds of dust that mounted in the partial, maimed, bright sun—beyond the roof’s long sword-sweep—the chickens were down there, stirring things up. They clucked baroquely.

“I’m not well yet,” she told Finduilas, the question in and then out of her voice.

“True.” Finduilas released one arm. “Don’t wait,” she said.

It was far enough from what Níniel had expected that she heard something else, then doubled back. “No?” She covered Finduilas’s fingers with her own, restless and yet impressed, as always, by the cool give in cross-grained skin. A few calluses, but they rode above… “That’s what I wanted to hear. But now I don’t understand this, either.”

“I go with him,” said Finduilas, “on his expeditions, or as close as he will let me come, to keep him near. I count myself his friend; I would have him safe. He knows this. You are different.” She raised a hand to Níniel’s face, crisply, though not without a moment’s mute petition—yes? all right? Her hand was cold. She seemed to be rubbing off some spot or mold-spore from a saved dry fruit, hunting virtue beneath. Then her attention lifted from Níniel’s jawline to her eyes, and she did something irresistible: she grew very solemn, and more serious still, and after a moment she snorted. She might have wanted to giggle. The eruption twisted long through its imperfect stifling.

“What I should have begun with. I’m very happy for you,” she managed at last. “And if I am urgent, it’s only because… I was betrothed. You guess correctly, he’s dead, but even that is not—”

She wiped at her face, and Níniel recalled her first attempt to heal her. Misaimed beauty: the ripple of that voice through unscathed bones.

“I’m sorry,” she said, leaning in, and resting her chin carefully on the slope of Finduilas’s arm.

“You are my best ally,” Finduilas replied. She hugged Níniel's shoulder. Everything now otherwise from when they met: neither distance nor the jumble of fear, but a conscientious pattern, space and closeness used as dyes. “Do not delay because Tirnen fights. With me or without me. Marry him, and let the war end here.”

Yes.

Some time passed. Níniel took over the nearly-empty tub of beans, working more slowly than Finduilas had. Finduilas began to skin a rabbit, its feet still tied.

“Do you like Brethil?” Níniel asked. She was sleepy, and a little chilled. A breeze had picked up. The brightness of the day made its bare hollows more infuriating. But she was comfortable inside her heavy woolens.

“Brethil?” Finduilas said. The wind was flirting with her hair, giving it thorns.

It occurred to Níniel that the question might be cruel. Finduilas was alone. But she didn’t intend it as a pressuring, child’s demand, a maneuver towards announced love or anything similar. She meant it as a question. “You seem happy,” she explained. More—‘concentrated,’ in truth, but she didn’t know how to put that to Finduilas, who regarded her squintingly and with perfect posture—a stance that still drove in on Níniel, stretching thick air. “I hope you are, of course.”

Finduilas smiled. It didn’t rearrange her previous expression; it was a knife turned over, or a candle capped. “Yes. I think so. It’s funny, you know. Have I told you about my father?”

Tirnen had. A chieftain, he’d said, dead, because…

“Yes. But he was the great-grandson of another lord—Finwë, king of the Noldor, and of all my people who came east.”

She grew inward. The sun had stepped down to place a rose at her cheek, which could not have grown in such soil. But the whole yard was flushed as though in pleased embarrassment. “For other members of my family that has meant many things. To belong to the House of Finwë is to reap marvels, and invite disaster… or so I am led to suppose.” Níniel, not understanding, murmured assent. Finduilas pushed back the tawny strand that had fallen over Níniel’s face, and probably transferred some rabbit blood in the process—Níniel contemplated revealing to her that her own pale hair was a bird’s nest, but refrained. “I have never felt it. I was exempt, or so I thought, generations removed. But now, in Brethil—with Tirnen and with you—”

She wasn’t smiling now but nodding, speaking flippantly and then painstakingly, as though checking to ensure that she had all the words. Níniel sympathized. She breathed out, and felt Finduilas’s hand glide past her shoulder.

“Here, with you, I think I know what it is they meant.”

Níniel set the tub aside. She had in mind Nen Girith. Also the people that had perished in the south; also Tirnen, whose proposal she had come to no conclusion on, even as a part of her was directing, with sure touches, the shape and carriage of a future in which he worked beside the other woodmen, and came home every night. No blood on him. None? She and Finduilas had different attitudes toward his forays. She, too, was desperately afraid that he would vanish; she dreamed of—a mountain, and him in it, somewhere. Stone. She was also proud. She liked how Dorlas and the others praised his skill.

Deeper, less known to her: something thought that it was right. If he returned, his furs soaked with black gore, from killing creatures she had never imagined, the servants of "the enemy”? It was right. Some flame in her that loved him wanted him to avenge himself, or to repay the evils that had left the Haladin hardly able to subsist, even after this gentle year… which _was_ gentle, everyone assured her, when she balked at hail for the first time. It further wanted—for him to go leaping through the undergrowth, his eyes hot coals. Yes. Frightening those monsters, who had done her little harm.

When Hunthor said, “He took off two heads at a stroke,” she extended her arm, that secret sword, and felt the blow flying down the long bone.

It was something out of her darkness. Not a piece of her life that was buried: forgetfulness proper, making her greedy. She said aloud, “You do so much for us.” Finduilas looked at her in surprise, and Níniel gained confidence. “For me and Tirnen. For Brethil’s folk. Truly did he name you! And maybe what you do for us…”

She remembered what he had said to her. I fled for many years; and I escaped when you did so.

“What you do for us,” she said, “you’ll do for everyone. Little though we are, Faelivrin, we are proof of your power.”

“What?” said Finduilas. She retreated, somehow. She ducked into herself as would a traveler escaping rain; all at once Níniel could not _see_ her, except for the glance she flung back at the storm. “I would not call you little,” she said, emerging again, covered and warm. “Everyone? But you are enough.”

*

So they were married. They exchanged their vows with the turn of the year, and leapt over a birch broom propped across their narrow threshold. The woodmen had built a house for them, high on the crown of Amon Obel. Outside were bonfires and toasting; but the front room was dark, someone stumbled, she received the wall’s rough push… Tirnen kissed her sternum, a gift of the cold.

By the spring she was pregnant. There they had some trouble; her illness, for months frozen in a mold of health, was released by the same industrious power which fledged green the trees’ arrows, darned the sky with birds. Her body was cast down. The illness took on the work of life, waving her limbs, widening her eyes—life, after its usual manner, made a home in a white grave.

They lay together less and less frequently, although with vigor on the return. Once, she had him in her arms. He had just come home from a long mission, his first since they were wed: harrying a band of couriers flown from Nargothrond to Angband. She leaned up to bite a place that seemed rather recklessly biteable, and time broke. When she opened her eyes it was late that morning; her memory of her husband ended in a cliff’s brink, tufting light.

She dressed and went out, arms trembling in the more ordinary style. He had left her breakfast in the questionable form of thickening porridge and wild strawberries; she could well imagine him gathering the berries, in a mad rush of solicitude, and falling into an adjacent patch of brambles, and getting blood-poisoning. Where was he? She was sticky under the arms, behind the thighs. Harnessed with sweat. She dug a hand under her breast to assure herself of its solidity; she felt like webbed nothing, or a rising wind, made manifest through its loose freight of dust. For her answer she got a pittance: a dull twinge between the legs. She stepped back from the window, as though someone might see.

There was no one there. When Finduilas entered, she did so by the back; the garden gushed green around her silhouette. But she had shut the door. “Níniel,” she said. “You’re awake?”

“Soon,” said Níniel.

“Would you like a lesson?” Finduilas asked, removing shapeless gloves. “The weeds and I are in a parley. They have eaten my spade.”

“Bad manners to a delegate!"

Finduilas looked pleased. “But maybe this way they’ll better digest the message.”

She had been teaching Níniel to write. White bark was the one crop Brethil yielded in abundance, and in addition Finduilas had inherited a bronze stylus from the dead man, Brandir, also responsible for Finduilas’s stock of powdered herbs. The Haladin would have given her his home at the center of the settlement as well, had either Tirnen or his Tear-Maid been willing to do without her.

Together, Níniel thought more calmly, they had made a merry winter of it. Like a person who had departed under cover of night, and who was friendly, secretive, not answerable to her wishes, she missed the house as it had been in snow: filled with song and the speech of the elves, equally musical. They had been visited at times by children who treated Finduilas with diffident attachment, and who were sent by their mothers to deliver food and wine. 

“Yes, let’s,” she decided aloud, putting the porridge back on the hearthstone to warm, and bringing the berries over to eat. Finduilas sat down on the clean-swept floor, at her insistence, and watched with mild bemusement as Níniel produced bark and charcoal from the several places where she had stored the precious tools. “You were telling me why I can’t spell it _walar_ …”

Scoring lines in wood, aiming herself at a square four inches across: it simplified her. As the bowstring loosed, her body wormed toward silence. If the room was still smudged at the corners, that was a small displacement. Finduilas’s edges were remarkably sharp.

At some point Finduilas suggested that they make a game of it—passing notes. What do I look like during my attacks? Níniel wrote.

“You’re still misattributing your vowels. Correct for a loremaster, actually, but not for everyday usage.” Finduilas read it again, and said, “I’m a poor artist.”

The refusal embarrassed Níniel. She kicked back against her anger, which seemed at that moment like a secret held in keeping for some other woman: a secret entirely separate from her, that had rolled from beneath thought’s high bed. She turned to Finduilas in time to see Finduilas eat a strawberry, her eyes still trained on Níniel’s clumsy tengwar.

“But a good teacher,” Níniel said. “What else is wrong?”

“If I’m a good teacher, the question ought to be, _what is prodigiously right_?” Finduilas murmured, swallowing. “Your hand’s much improved. To say nothing of your vocabulary. Níniel, about the fits…”

Níniel carefully stopped listening. She was tired, and beginning to be sorry that she'd wasted the morning. What do I look like—it was not a phrase she would have mustered six months ago. She had been formulating it since Finduilas came in from the garden.

So she did something else. Finduilas’s head lifted, and there was that insurmountable berry-red, her mouth. Which soon fell out of view.

They had often kissed one another. In friendship, and in care—Finduilas had kissed her when her fever broke. This was easier. For a slow moment Níniel was convinced that they were sharing a clear thought: about sweetness and an unpleasant slipping, which improved as she heaved her mouth up.

Finduilas made a sound.

Níniel tipped them backward, because she could. Finduilas’s hip nudged her knee. Finduilas’s hand groped by her waist. The thing had turned disorderly: no cavern of a center. Níniel, almost prone, legs slung where they would fit, had to admit the kissing wasn’t worse that way. It was as if she had touched an emptiness, safe beneath the morning’s veils; and now she had retreated, she had thrown in with the shroud. Bolts of fine cloth—one for air and one for heat, and one for the shine across disarranged tresses—two for the floor and Finduilas’s snug weight! Each sense piled over her, until she was concealed.

Finduilas made a high, engulfed, distinctly _protesting_ sound.

Níniel recoiled. Her hands flew from Finduilas’s neck, and she landed hard on her back.

There were a few immediate compensations. She rolled to one side. Her head, she learned or imagined in that instant, had been scattered across many different places—in the bare bed she had woken to and the window with no watcher; in the napkin of berries and Finduilas’s profile, cleanly hewn. Now the fragments allied against herself, their common enemy.

It hurt and rang to be made whole once more. “ _Sorry_ ,” she said, fervently. “I’m so sorry.” She got to her elbows before Finduilas could help her, shielding herself with her hair.

“I fear we both misunderstood each other,” said Finduilas.

“No, I’m very stupid,” Níniel informed her. “I woke up, and ever since…”

Finduilas touched her own still-smeary lower lip. Without any context, Níniel remembered a fleck of blood from a flayed, a pinkish-purple, tongue-like animal. The blood had gotten behind her ear. Cold and off-center, it had twisted the feeling in her face to a point. Was this like that?

Finduilas said, with open curiosity, “Níniel, I’m not angry. I’m not even— Do you know that you can’t?”

This struck Níniel as funny, if also warranted. No one had gone out of their way to explain marriage’s formalities to her: or not in words. But, “Yes,” she replied. “I know. It’s not that. I don’t know what it was.” She sat up, ignoring the rush of nausea. “When I fell ill this morning,” she said, “I felt cheated. Yet now it seems the higher price to have paid—that I should offend my friend, and make free of her trust in me!”

“Not so strong,” Finduilas said, with just a hint of amusement, bending over her. “Cheated? What do you mean by that?”

"Maybe only—I wanted to feel more like myself.”

She spoke well. It was one of the stranger things she had unearthed: that she could make others listen, even when the words were wrong. It helped, in this case, that she believed what she said, though between phrases she fed in—for the completeness of her understanding—the thread of Tirnen’s long back, arching and sinking, and the way Finduilas’ cautious questions touched her vanity. And what? What more was there? Finduilas raised her to her feet. She patted Níniel’s belly: maybe proposing to anchor its contents with good-will.

Tirnen had told her that the Eldar loved only once. Níniel thought, I would never hurt Tirnen. But that meant nothing, as a law, because she had never imagined that she could. He seemed in some way to belong to her; he was contained in the lore of her body. Whatever harm she worked, she could repair. And she asked herself—with the serious condescension she reserved for those thoughts that leapt blindly, always surer than the rest—whether she was ashamed, and wanted to take back her trespass; or if she only wanted to change Finduilas’s answer.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. She had a sudden presentiment of beauty, which was satisfied when she looked up.

“It’s all right,” Finduilas said. She wore an odd, bitter smile. “Loneliness too I can read.”

They spoke for a little while of her illness, and of the suggestions Finduilas had drawn up for keeping it in control. In time, Níniel guessed that the worst of it would be Finduilas's knowledge of her weakness, and she resolved then and there not to resent it, when she had no right to.

“Where is Tirnen?” she asked.

Finduilas sat down, this time at the table. “Fishing,” she said. “Good idea, that.”

There was a shallow beck that looped around about a mile north of the hill. It dangled there, sweetly catenary, from some point of frayage much higher on Celebros. It had trout. And although he was farther upstream than he should have been, if he wanted good catch, he wasn’t hard to tail on his own ground; that much, he held in common with her memories.

He was kneeling on a very minor promontory. He’d been crying. “You!” he said absurdly, when she came down out of the brush to halt, crane-legged, on the bank opposite.

There rose the dour face which he had spared her so long as they were strangers, and which she loved—he could be pompous and high-handed, a thwarted child, and she would feel the more complete. She jumped the stream, nearly; landed on a good stone, ankle-deep in the honey-dark snowmelt, and before he could speak took another step up, dripping from the feet and the ends of her cloak.

“Will you always follow me?” he asked, wondering. He caught her arm.

“Anywhere,” she said, not thinking about it. She had just seen, like a door ajar, the sword that hung long and black at his hip. “But I would rather bring you back.”

For no obvious reason, he gave a disbelieving shout. Was that laughter? He lifted her up by the waist and he spun her, and stepped down into the water, and kissed her; bearing her high until she set a knee to either side of his neck. What a scramble—she grabbed fistfuls of his hair, trying to straighten up, and almost toppled them both into the stream. He was provably laughing, grinning into her thigh. “Where did you come from,” he called, and she said, “I was raised by deer!”

His hands grew steady at her back. Despite his tone of surprise, he was like a man who, through great personal effort, had recovered something that was stolen from him. “I was so afraid I’d hurt you,” he said.

"You can’t.”

“You don’t know what it looks like,” he said. “As though you’d died, and I was seeing you by lighting—gone, and there, and gone, and gone, and gone.”

It didn’t sting as much as she had feared it would. “There again. Will you be brought?” she asked, bent over his head, able to see just the plated sun on his dark hair.

“Of course. Though you’ll have to carry me.” He heaved her over his shoulder, and marched up the far shore.

So Finduilas’s guess proved finally good, though there had been detours: after that, Tirnen left not to fight, but to lend his hand to the strengthening of the rebuilt stockade, or to help train younger men in combat. Maybe because she had surrendered to him from the first, without demands or limits, his acquiescence now was as complete; he did not speak of what had changed between them. And Finduilas went no longer to hold vigil by the bridge.

He would return to them after sunset, having eaten with his companions. Warm and mud-brindled, he would kiss Níniel’s cheeks, cross her hands and uncross them, and kiss her stomach, reverentially. It was the reverence that he must once have shown Finduilas’s father, and now showed Manthor when they met outside the chieftain’s hall: a thoughtless siege. But she was his wife, and received it very willingly. She would only have had him push her, wrestle with her, greet her beneath defended walls.

There was nothing to be done. He crouched there as if hobbled. She saw his face, too-redly bruised by dusk, and nearly kicked him, stretching out her knees.

*

“Gwindor?” said Finduilas.

She sat perched on the edge of the bed, cradling their son. He was easier to credit as a parcel in her arms: his head reduced to just the forehead’s hull and a stem of a nose. Finduilas held very still—she had had to be shown how to lift him—and that helped, perhaps. The light of the taper fell on his face in bright stages, it gathered like dust.

Finduilas glanced at Tirnen. “Is this your wish, as well?”

Tirnen was almost asleep in his chair, but he jerked awake at the question. “Yes,” he said, worriedly. “Shouldn’t it be? You don’t—mind?”

“Not in the least,” Finduilas said or pronounced. Without obvious transition, she added, “He wasn’t always kind to you.”

"He wished to teach me wisdom.” He hesitated, and went on very quietly, in a voice that asked everything of its hearer— “Did I not say to you he would be healed?”

Finduilas laughed with sheer, vigilant enjoyment, like a hosting lord at his king's first sally. Then some other idea stoked her; her face flared out of gloom. She had turned her head, no doubt, but also every feature leapt to the fore of Níniel's thought. They shaped a series of expressions that she had sometimes donned with Níniel alone, and with Níniel and Tirnen, never. Bewildered hope—a hope so anxious, startled and aghast, that like true flame it told you there was darkness all around.

It also involved a limited amount of foolish staring. “This is... not our custom. But— 'The young lord,’” she muttered. “Gwindor again. _Adan_ -Gwindor. It suits.”

Afterwards she called him Adan. It was hardly a name; some of the Haladin, when they noticed, were obscurely, wryly affronted, though they had been quick enough to dub Finduilas the Elf-Maid of Brethil. But it made Tirnen smile. Níniel gathered that it was intended half in echo of some title he had gone by, Man-Elf or Dark Man or the dreadful equivalent. Little Gwindor, in any case, repaid the slight within the year, and rendered Finduilas _finnu,_ or _tumba_ : the singer-to-rest, Níniel thought these must translate, and the keeper of delights.

It was a good year. She had felt, toward the end of her pregnancy, that there was something wrong in each day's conformation—that it had, assembling itself by night, left out a piece life rested on. When the baby moved, she felt a hunter’s hand inside her: dressing her for transport, and cleaning what had died. But when Gwindor came she loved him helplessly. The uncompleted world overturned; even what horror had seized her, she grew to connect with her love. So that in time she might be cowed by some quite separate danger, chary of the dark, or thunder, or the cry of a wolf; and shivering, she would think, ah, my son.

During the pregnancy she had also been haunted by scenarios of increasing procedural complexity, related to the disease, in which she dropped the baby on his head, and fell atop him, and battered him to death. She had been glad to think that Finduilas would be near, to save Gwindor from Níniel. Yet instead she grew strong. There were two fits shortly after he began sleeping through the night, as if the grueling medicine of permanent wakefulness—delivered in drips through sharp gums at her breast—had protected her; as if the evil, perhaps, could only enter while she slept. But then her body quietened, and her worst symptom became the old vigilance. (That worked in her until she was amused by, and rather scornful of, the blossom of good health.)

Tirnen returned to her bed. Him she couldn’t tire of. He would keep her up half the night in perfect chasteness, speaking nonsense, and regaling her with snatches from a song about their son’s presumed great prowess— _The Deeds of Gwindor Tirnenion, Who Made His Mother Proud_. Then, like a boy reminded of a flattering duty, entrusted to him at an unusual age—he would reach for her beneath the covers; and draw his fingers down the steps of her ribs.

Once he said, “I used to be very angry with her.”

They were twined together with several quilts. Níniel felt a mass digging into her calf that might have been her own trapped leg. “Who?”

“Turambar,” he said, tracing a circle high on her flank. “After we were wed, she admitted… that she had coaxed you to yield. When you were doubtful! She said she used everything she had. And then, you conceived so soon…”

“You asked me,” she pointed out, mesmerized by his finger, which in its rounds cast a shadow of his mouth, and breathed hotly on skin.

“I was a fool.” He lowered his brows and firmed his lips, a perfect likeness of his scowl when she had first denied him. She choked laughing. “Yes, see? That was my motley. And fool that I was, I expected Finduilas to be always wiser.” The finger glided down. “Now I wonder how I could have cursed… No one was more eager for our happiness to begin.”

“And she didn’t persuade me,” Níniel said, remembering. “She spoke in your favor, but I was another two weeks deciding.”

“It might have been two years. You don’t remember how you were then—stopping for an hour to consider the breeze!” What an exaggeration. She tugged his hair in sternest remonstrance; he buried his face in her neck, and gave a sort of mirth-tortured sneeze. “You’d hold the harvest hostage to a lecture on anatomy. —And how do you know she _didn’t_ persuade you? She’s an elf of the West.”

She smiled a little, made impatient by the joke. She had too clear and doubtless too enticing an impression of those days, when what she knew had been a raft light enough to steer by leaning. How should anyone have persuaded her? To what road could she have been urged, when she was learning, with a skeptic’s eye, to call each bird by its right name? Also she found his awe of Finduilas disturbing, and thought of it, therefore, as cruel. The Finduilas that dwelt in Níniel’s mind was a woman asleep by a window, nearly spent from the labor of grief. (Though even as Níniel chalked in that silhouette, she was accounting, or striving to account for, the glittering rime of Finduilas’s humor, which announced a recent thaw—and for the intermittent preoccupation that marked not _absence_ but an _elsewhere_ ; the dip in the snow above a thing that lived, slowly, and underground.) She deserved every consideration, but worship squandered her talents: she who could—in matters great as a marriage proposal!—be comforted, confided-to, admired, and ignored.

“I am very well now,” she informed him. “Knowledgeable, good concentration... as for your harvest, I can reach the highest fruits.”

“Oh, aye, yes,” Tirnen said. “Wild woman, why else did I marry you?”

One other grace hallowed that year: orcs came no more to the outermost fringes of Brethil, and fared ever away and to the north.

But when Gwindor was complaining almost comprehensibly of the heat of his first summer, reports soured. _The worm,_ Finduilas had said, and now it rose. It burned across the plains.

Tirnen said, “It may not come for us. How should it know where I reside? I’ve done it small harm since I came here.”

Níniel could remember some three years of her life. In none of them had the orcs and the wargs been plausible, but there had been structure to her disbelief. In the first year, they were a vivid fancy, nearly useful in how they blocked off the corners of the map. In the second year she had feared them absolutely, though not more than she had feared her own shadow. In the third year they'd faded out of all recognition. She had been better, in the end, at mistrusting her body.

Now she felt lightheaded. Fumey, and the long line of the plains burned in relative comfort, rolled to an ache behind her ribs.

But Tirnen was almost sincere, until two scouts arrived with news that Glaurung approached the Taeglin. “Lord,” they said, “he turns not aside.”

They had come first to him, not Manthor. He called an assembly. Finduilas sat very still, in the bend of the window, until both scouts left once more—trailing the rasp of smoke—to summon the woodmen from their dwellings outside the stockade. Then she stood fluidly.

“You're being hasty,” she said.

Tirnen reached out to her, and hesitated; turned his hand up, as though presenting his friend to an unseen audience. As he had done for Níniel, when they plighted their troth. “Nothing's decided,” he said. “But should I pretend the enemy is not nigh?”

“The Taeglin isn't Brethil,” Finduilas said, enunciating. “If you venture forth, certainly his eye must fall on you—but if you wait, he may yet pass us by.”

“Will I abide here even to the burning of the trees?” Tirnen was always better-humored, more courteous, in the path of others’ panic. “But no; for it must be the river.”

“You have a plan,” Finduilas said, searching his face. “So much for indecision.”

“I seek to counsel the woodmen, not command them. But for myself, yes. I know what I will do.”

Níniel wrapped her arms around her husband from behind. She bent her face to the knob of his spine, and kissed his hand when it flew up promptly to intercept her. It wasn’t the time to speak; or else she was afraid to. She breathed the empty scents of skin and hair, which stood as though in place of something richer: an irreplaceable good, served by a laggard envoy. He said several words to her, lovingly, and went to get his cloak. How he managed it she couldn’t tell, since she still felt him in her arms.

“Túrin,” said Finduilas. She had abandoned sarcasm. She was angry, and it evoked the way she spoke to him in gladness: sweet speech, grave speech, wrapped with hesitance and calm. “Be careful.”

A look went between them that put a crease in air.

“Careful of the woodmen?” Tirnen said. “Of a peaceable assembly?”

Finduilas took a short step forward; she had knotted her hands behind her back. “You've never seen him. You know not what you chase.”

“But you have told me of his make,” Tirnen said, “and from my father I heard tell of his great wounds. He's not invulnerable.”

“No more are you. Nor was yours the victory, the last time he opposed you.”

“Have I forgotten? I woke among bones. But Finduilas, fear not the doom that came to us at Narog. If I fail, you will at least have a warning. And you shall lead the free forth from this place.”

Finduilas recoiled, and seemed on the verge of some explosion. Níniel said, raising her voice, “Mormegil I have heard, and Adanedhel. Who is Túrin?”

“No one!”

For a moment she didn't know who had spoken. "No one," Tirnen said again. “A dead man.” He gazed from Níniel to Finduilas in the evident hope that this had satisfied, and made to depart. With one foot past the threshold, he thrust his head back through the door. His face was calm. Shock and vague entreaty had settled, leaving pure a cup of fury. Set against his silly poise, those clear depths staggered Níniel. “Maybe when I return, Turambar will have mastered her tongue.”

He had forgotten his sword. Finduilas shut the door after him, none too gently.

“There's something I _should_ tell you, before he finishes there. Would that I had been permitted to lay it aside before we met! The road is long enough, and weary enough, without such burdens. But then it was not given to me to abandon—or even because I had no value for it. And now I think I see how it must be.”

This made no sense to Níniel. “Túrin,” she said again, mouthing the name. Finduilas looked at her for perhaps the first time since the scouts had gone.

“Have you heard it before?”

“No,” said Níniel automatically. Then she frowned. “Would I know?”

Finduilas pressed steepled hands to her mouth. “Come with me into the garden,” she said, and Níniel went, scooping up Gwindor as she passed him at the hearth.

It was green without as a plague of beetles, and Finduilas had made a throne of the fence and her own arranged limbs. Legs folded, arms stretched over knees. Níniel knelt beside her, feeling young and very secret. She kissed the top of Gwindor's head, and Finduilas passed an open hand before her stinging eyes.

“There’s something there,” she said.

“What?”

“Your memory. I’ve looked before, but this… there’s a hook.”

It was less strange to hear Finduilas speak of irrelevancies—her memory, her history—in the sun than in the house. Through a knothole in the boards of the fence she glimpsed the bright, grim eye of a chicken. A little kingdom, to be so much partitioned. She said, “What should I do?”

“Will you bring me my harp?”

It had been a gift from Tirnen, crafted from the wood of the region and some of Finduilas’s hair. Finduilas made a few adjustments and began to play. Níniel lured Gwindor over from where he was chewing on a vine, and heaved him into her lap, to which he submitted with bad grace. He liked Finduilas’s music, however. He did his best to sing along.

But this was not a melody in which “ _mama ba boo fin”_ could keep its head above the tide. There was a brooch at Finduilas's throat, pinned incongruously to a simple length of cotton. What was the old tale? About a woman's head falling off? But then Finduilas was of the Eldar; for all Níniel knew, decapitation might mend. The brooch was leaf-green and leaf-sharp. In other seasons, Finduilas wore it to keep shut her long mantle.

The song used words Níniel had never studied. Driven before the music, she parsed them as one truth: if greater familiarity with Quenya might have let her admire a phrase, grasp the meaning at arm's length—here she was in a room with a loved one, eyes closed. There was no distance. No looking at them; no assuring herself through the roundabout pleasures of sight. There was only recognition, which neither defended itself, nor relented. She knew the story bluntly, felt it printed on her skin.

Finduilas sang: “ _There was a maid, a queen, a fool._ ” Níniel's eyes dropped back to the brooch.

In the song she had her back against a tree. There was a man very close to her, his hands on her. No, that was an orc. At last she knew what they look like. She had known what they looked like since she was a child, three hundred years ago.

“Don't worry,” Finduilas said, merry as if there was no spear held up to nose at memory's throat. “I've an idea. It was my great-uncle who told me... one always pays. One can do great things; one simply has to budget for it.” Household economy cast a line down through strange waters, and Níniel's amazement must have bitten, even at the bottom of the dream: Finduilas ducked her head in dissembling pride. “Too much traffic with the dwarves! Yet he taught me much. And it strikes me—in all my healing, I never thought—” She was becoming excited. Níniel was, too, with every tail-fan of bright chords. “A secret given willingly for an unwilling loss. Doesn't that seem tidy? I can make a working of it. I would have told you this regardless. When you know, you'll be able to speak with Tirnen, and lead him away from here. But this proves... This is kindness unlooked-for. Though it be hard, and the end unhappy—in two ways shall I help.”

She resumed her song. This was the secret, evidently: Finduilas had once smelled an orc's breath. Now it was saying something to her, madly wheedling. “What's in it for you, hey? What did He tell you? But then—” the spear leapt for attention “—d'you really think you'll make it north, alone?”

“That's not my errand,” Finduilas said. The brooch was skin-warm in her hand.

Níniel had heard the tale of how Finduilas, when the time came, had freed herself through action. The sequence unraveled before Tirnen arrived, however; or else the deeper past thrust through it. Finduilas was marching, blindly, near the end of a long chain, the prisoners shackled hand to hand. Women she had spoken to every day of her life: and she seemed to be giving them up, surrendering them, without ever losing sight of their backs.

Once she tried to save a child. She had said the name, “Glaurung,” and something acid in addition to that. They had whipped her until she fell, and poured foul liquor down her throat. And she had risen up.

The music wheeled like a mounted foe. Back, back, and back... Finduilas was underground. Here was the kingdom Níniel had guessed at, had wished for and measured in between her two friends' hands! It was burning. The light of the fire drowned itself in Glaurung's polished scales. What air had rendered lithe and fierce took on, through mirroring, a crafted permanence—not fire, but a torc of gold, set down at last by shipwreck. If it flickered, _that_ was through the intercession of deep water.

“Hail, daughter of Orodreth,” Glaurung said, fire unsubmersed in his maw. It didn't burn her. She raised her eyes to his.

*

Finduilas must have noticed when the spell snapped loose. “Níniel,” she said, scrabbling to capture its ends; played a few hurried notes— _of closing, of binding, of cautery_! “What do you see?”

“What did the dragon say to you?” Niënor asked. “What did you say to each other?”

“...He said, 'Well met. Well met, I would say, were you a foe to be greeted: but you are not that. A man calls your name beyond the doors of Felagund; and you remain. You are deaf to his hope. Therefore let us treat, lady, as befits king and petitioner. Your father is dead. Gwindor, prince of thralls, has found the end of his long leash. You have failed your people. What will you wish for?'

“And I thought, 'Mormegil!' It seemed to me that I had no thought other.”

Gwindor had crawled away to investigate the cucumber trellis. Niënor saw the dusky skin of his hands, his brown neck, very like his father's, and she would have wept if he had fallen. In the grip of that terror she had accepted as love, she thought, I'll leave him soon.

Finduilas was still talking. “'Mormegil!' And he was pleased. 'Mormegil you shall save,' he said, 'if such is your wish. On one condition: you must take him from the war. All his courage, all his cunning—his mastery over the hearts of men—it will turn to waste, through you. Keep him to the shadows; drive him to mourn beside the sea. Then may his doom be averted, and my master account himself satisfied, seeing how Túrin Húrin's son is betrayed by his last friend.'

“'This is a hard task,' I said. As if he were a tutor I might sway.

“'Hard for you, perhaps, whom he loves not! But take heart; for help shall come. And expect me! For if you do this thing, he will know bliss to the end of his days; but you and I, Finduilas, will have another errand together.'

“So you see,” Finduilas said, “it's not for Tirnen that he comes. I have used you ill. Against his strength, you were my sword. But your lord is Túrin son of Húrin, whom Morgoth cursed, and if he would name himself protected, he should listen to his guard.” She buried her face in her arms, very briefly. “That is all there is. I didn't want to obey; I didn't for a moment believe him; the _glamhoth_ bore me north. I watched those children die, and Tirnen would not be turned. Nor do I blame him. I only, ever, wished to draw him off. To lead him aside, to end the pursuit—Níniel, will you tell me what I've done? What do you remember?”

Niënor said, “Take him to Doriath yourself, if you would go.”

Finduilas stared.

Niënor wanted to shake her, and smiled. “Do you think the dragon will spare him because you are gone? I know what it is that you hope for. But think you, truly, that he will be content with one service, and stoop to kill you, who have proved so willing?”

“I healed,” Finduilas said. “You had a hand in that. I am not now the captive in her chains. Whatever he asks of me, whatever poison he spews... I can yet say nay.”

“I am Niënor, daughter of Húrin,” Niënor said, “and you are not cured.”

Finduilas jerked as though dropped from a height: smashed against the hard floor of the fence. But the earth was stable, the sky remained upward, and Niënor stood easily. Only when she went into the house did vertigo take her, and she found the room had capsized into golden water. The ceiling billowed up, and every familiar object was revealed for a cunning chain of facets, a surface disturbed. Sunset? Was that sunset? No, not yet. But she must be drunk. Finduilas had followed her, Gwindor not bundled in her arms but crawling after. Finduilas was saying nothing, only choking on her name.

She had a sudden glimpse at a woman’s face, hard-eyed and dear. “Morwen,” she said, and picked up the sword.

“Níniel, you must wait,” Finduilas said, coming closer. Idly Niënor thrust the sword in her direction: not too near, but accurately, the sort of fettered candor Finduilas had always used. Finduilas stopped. Niënor took down a roll of birch bark from the shelf, and scratched a word on it in jest—she did not really think Túrin would read it. Forgive me. Forgive her.

 _If he would name himself protected, he should listen to his guard._ “A Turambar turún' ambartanen,” she said, and smiled at Finduilas a second time, feeling the day's last heat squeeze her cheek.

Finduilas said, with surprising steadiness, “This isn't less reason to want me fed to the dragon.”

“No! I wish you every happiness. Do you think you did this? You did nothing. Only tell me, Turambar—you never knew?”

Her face was worse than guilt would have been, presumably.

“No, I see. And you didn't wonder?” Niënor tried not to laugh. “But then why should you have? We aren't much alike, my brother and I.” When she strapped the belt to her hips it hung there easily.

There was a long silence. “You won't stay.”

“How can I? But I'm sorry, of course. Don't fly to the worm! And have a care for my son.”

“Túrin will be dragon enough for me,” said Finduilas, “if you depart. And what will he do to himself?”

"That's why I'm taking the sword."

She left alone. Ephel Manthor was a king's tomb at this hour, each chamber bricked expensively by the failing light. She came to the western exit of the stockade, and found that she had chosen badly: two men were arguing there in low voices, not the usual sentries. Hunthor and Dorlas. Was it possible that the assembly was over? But no, smoke still rose from the roof of the chieftain's hall: these two, she judged, had left early, their own purposes satisfied, the better to revive an old quarrel.

Doriath, Finduilas had said. Doriath, Doriath. It was hard enough to leave Brethil. Niënor approached them, drawing close her cloak around her: too warm for midsummer, but was she not the shivering maid?

“Hail, bravehearts!” she said, setting one hand on the gate.

“Hail Níniel, wife to the great!” said Dorlas, bowing preposterously.

She almost slipped through then. But Hunthor put a hand on her arm, saying, “Your husband seeks you, I believe. Or will do soon—just now he placates Manthor. But the plan is settled. On the morrow we go: Dorlas, Tirnen, and I.”

“Assuming Hunthor and I don't kill each other first,” Dorlas interjected.

“He may seek me a little longer,” Niënor said, trying to be gay.

Hunthor studied her. “What do you need from the forest?”

“Mushrooms for my husband's table.” She took a quick step back. Hunthor looked uneasy; but Dorlas, ever-mirthful, took up the theme.

“He needs better fare than that. We face a great undertaking. Nourish him with your beauty!”

She should have bobbed her head. But something in her sickened: beauty, maybe. Manthor, they said, would have courted her, if Túrin had not made clear—

She stumbled. Again Hunthor caught her arm, with a light in his eyes that she recognized; he was close kinsman to the people's lord, the crippled man who had died, he was often somber, and, what, he looked at her with grief? She drew the sword. He let go of her, quickly.

Dorlas, for some reason, was laughing. “So that's why he didn't have it with him when he—' _The Black Thorn of Brethil_ '!” Was that low growl meant to be Túrin? He mimed an empty upward thrust.

Hunthor said, “Shut up.” He had both hands raised, palm-forward, but he said, “Lady, be wise.”

“Don't follow me,” she said, “don't tell him, if you love him, don't speak—” and she ran out the gate. Neither of them stopped her. The sword's edges were shimmering, the eye-whites of a young deer. She ran down the hill and cursed herself, and crossed the beck and cursed herself; she went north, west, and south, wherever the forest opened to her. She was a fool; she would draw them all after. This was not escape.

Once, she had fled through the wood, away from Mablung and hope, tearing off her tunic. She couldn't seem to summon the energy. She tripped and dashed and stopped, winded, a cramp biting at her belly like string.

When the moon had risen, she stopped and knelt in a glade. The trees had been cut and peeled from the ground, and hung in silver strips. She held Gurthang before herself and said, “Will you kill me?”

“You?” said the sword. “You are only a thief.”

Repeated experiments proved its point. She rose and ran on.

*

When she reached Nen Girith, she set one foot on the bridge and turned back. Here was an edge: was it sharp enough? The falls were strung with starlight, and played unceasingly.

“Gwindor!” she cried. “Tirnen! Túrin!” She struggled to unstrap the sword from her side, pinched her finger, and fell. On her face in the grass, shaking, she had a dream.

It was something from when she was a child, and therefore both an insult and a gift. She saw raised before her eyes the house at Dor-lómin: larger and fairer by far than what Haleth's people had built on Amon Obel, and yet decayed, overgrown with weeds and ivy. It defied its few dwellers' attempts to cherish it; it was like an old man, once lord and protector of all his folk, now too proud to be nursed. She hadn't known that. She had loved the vines.

Aerin was speaking quietly to Morwen in the garth. Her sandy hair, more lank and drab than Niënor's, was bound back, as ever, in the style of the Easterlings, with many poor ornaments. Niënor's favorite was a long pin carved from antler, which boasted a pendant in the shape of a mysterious beast. The _annabon_ , Aerin called this latter, for its long nose. Of course it had another name, a proper name, but Aerin did not know it. Was the name perhaps the symbol that was stamped in its dull clay? Maybe. None of them at Húrin's house could read Eastern characters. Morwen, pressed to answer, said without looking that the sign meant 'thrall.'

What did the dream think of Brodda's wife? To her inclusion came affixed some clotted mass of feeling: as though the dream had found the edge of where she lay lodged in their lives, and had dug her free. Her face, her whole bearing, were smoothed to clean sheerness by the flow of looking-past; but when she turned she turned out of the bed of the scene—left a hollow in silt, and on her back bore soft black stirrings.

She had brought a basket, as always. “I feared to take this,” she said, turning something over beneath the covering of wool. It was a gift she had never brought them in life, Niënor knew without looking.

“But having taken it,” Morwen replied, “it must be used.”

Niënor sat up, and found her face was wet with tears. Loathing herself, suddenly frantic, she thought, I have disarmed my brother. And why? Why—At least here I will leave him his sword. I will jump. She felt his breath over her shoulder, his puff of a chuckle: she would have turned to catch him in the grin, if she thought she could have turned in time. If he wouldn't have arranged his smile, perfectly, into a doleful grimace. And even then—for his posture, too, she would have turned, for the familiar slouch, their son sitting astride his foot, and one knee drawn up to bear the graceful, open hand. And she would have turned for his advice. Had she not dreamed of a brother to advise her? When their mother was weary. When their father was lost. Where was his advice? “Níniel, kiss me.”

She crossed the bridge, and kept walking. The moon had almost set. She was weak from the fit; how long she had lain there she couldn't guess. She walked slowly, dragging her feet, and felt more accomplished for exerting great force. Yet she was moving downhill, and it was easier to go forward than up. Gurthang's blade lipped at the night and drank from it, growing darker as the rest, very faintly, grew gray.

She came to the Crossings and passed over. The Taeglin roared at her back.

But she wasn't so distracted that she was willing to leave the river entirely, and she turned left, veering only a little away from its banks, to escape what seemed to her to be a blankness, a rip in the weave. Meanwhile the land grew dark again, and very noxious. She began to fall into a daze. At one point she knew she had stopped moving, but she put out a foot to catch herself, because the ground was dipping supply toward some weight—and, there, she had gone another half-mile.

The water still just audible. Listening to it, she thought, I forgot about the dragon.

She began to laugh so hard that it felt like her lungs had broken open. The sea inside her body spilt its banks, salted the land. What stung must purge. So that was why she hadn't jumped! All this way, and she'd been angry at the dragon!

Night opened an eye.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh, no.”

The eye was half her height, and it glowed like a dog's. Greenish and tepid, it sloshed once between dry lids. Then the vast mouth opened; and the eye, propped above it, became a blaze.

“But you are not who I had looked to find.”

His voice was softer than she remembered it, burred by his pleasure. She had faced him once on a great hill under the placid sag of noon. Now there were no hills, only cliffs and deeps.

“Niënor, daughter of Húrin! We meet again ere you end. Do you yet seek your brother?”

Then she had to move. The eye receded out of the main part of her thought—or came closer, swallowing her until it was not seen. She flew through a darkened hall, though her feet could not stir. She was seeking something she had often sought in vain. Here, miracle of miracles, the door appeared under her hand. She would have liked, perhaps, to pass it by, and save the violence of her gratitude for a later time; but her hand fell to the latch. Light, depth, greenery. There spread out beneath her lay the vale of her life.

Beneath? For, yes, she had been mistaken in thinking she wandered through her home in the dark. She had been placed somewhere higher up than Amon Obel, on a seat of black stone; and she had accepted a mercy, and looked.

But, she thought, I have seen all this before. I have seen it in a garden, where it hurt. There was some agitation in the mind that surrounded her, which held her mind as a falcon does a hare. She slipped out. She was bored. She raised her sword and smote his open eye.

There was time to doubt. He had stopped her. Surely? He had stopped her as she surged forth. Her hand was fixed in the air above her head, she could see the hilt—and the growing crack, where iron split the lens.

He screamed, and she was lifted up. Her weight dragged wide the wound. Flames shot from the spiked jaws beneath her, and she heaved herself higher, away, landing one hand on the ridge over the socket: kicking for purchase, kicking the eye that jerked and spun—the great lids strove again to shut, and she pushed them apart, stepping on skin—her hand was burning. That was his blood begun to flow. She felt his haw beat wet against her heel. The eerie shine of his glance was diminished, added to waves of rising red; he flamed again, a new river, and ran.

“ _Why_ ,” he intoned, “ _would you do that,_ ” tossing his head to dislodge her. She had cut her hand on the scales of his brow, and the slide weakened her grip. The sword hadn't traveled far enough. Could she reach the brain? She wasn't sure whether she dared pull Gurthang out to aim again. He moved more quickly than he had a right to, with his girth, pausing only occasionally to turn his head and drag it against the earth, or to claw at his neck. That she survived, she supposed, was proof he could not see.

Then the Taeglin was before them. She screamed. He, eager, as though spurred by her voice, plunged over the edge. Not all the way: he reared back, and fell, and reared again, gouging great holes in the wall of the ravine. Half-plugging the river with stones. When he had rooted himself there, half his body dropped over the cliff, he began trying to throw her off in earnest.

But he had tired, perhaps, in the rush to the brink. He flamed twice—he bit at night's throat, and flame sprayed out. It pumped up the walls of the canyon, and scorched her back and hair. His body was a shield. For a long unfurling she saw into the ravine, yellow as though ripe, and chewed to bare the creased kernel, the water. The flames tore away; with them went the fruit. The broad arcs of the head gutted her each time, but counted from above they might seem slow. Compressed to him, the wound, and darkness, she decided not to free her sword, but with a meticulous struggle drove it deeper.

Someone was screaming a word. “Thief!” they said many times. “You took it from me!” Gurthang, again? But no, that wasn't the iron voice of the sword.

At length Gurthang slid past the last resistance. Pain didn't come, just a whisper of heat. There was upheaval not unlike what he had done in malice. She should have tumbled away; her other hand opened, it fell. But her sword arm had gone in to the elbow. For the last time, his eye held her.

As though his spasms had been all that moved in her mind, thought and hatred the clatter of trees in a gale, a dead wood's buffeting—when the head stilled, she too lost consciousness. When she came to, her buried arm had gone numb; except that she hadn't fallen, she would have believed that it had burned to ash inside its sheath. She didn't want to fall. She could see her face reflected in the glass curve beneath her, but that seemed strange—long, and scraped to nothing.

Fear ran a hand down her as if hoping to soothe. Her shoulder ached; she tried to hitch herself up, and didn't know what she would have done had she succeeded. What if I have another attack, she thought, right now? And shake myself loose. It was possible. Finduilas had told her that she shouldn't overexert herself. She dreaded nothing so much as the water, though without loathing or bitterness, and in the easy knowledge that she'd longed for it before. The spume drenched her legs. She dug foul chunks out of the dragon's eye with her other hand, never releasing her clenched hold on the embedded sword, and shoving it deeper when her work had loosened its wet seat; finally she had dug far enough, and turned enough, that she was perched on the floor of the socket, feet drawn up. Blood oozed over her. Its potency had lessened: it was only hot, a bold caress. At some point a trickle passed her lips. She said to herself, Now I will die.

Her skirt was gathered, absurdly, into a long tail, white and tearlike from the lip of the hole.

*

She thought she heard the voices of the birds. She could understand them, and they spoke to her. _Níniel! Niënor!_ Outside was pale, and smelled of mist.

“Níniel. Wake up.”

It was a voice loaded with impertinent joy; it was coming from the wrong direction.

She leaned forward, helplessly, until she could see past the wall of her cell. In the hole made by Glaurung's right foreleg stood Finduilas. She had climbed up the hill of shattered stone, and was upright, not even stooped, beside the massive gold talon, stiffened to a pillar. How had she gotten there? She was wet to the knees.

“We have to get you down,” she informed Niënor. And added, to no apparent purpose: “You killed him!”

It was a distance of perhaps ten ells from the dead head, suspended, to the cavern. Niënor wondered that it should be so small, and shrank from the gap. In silence she watched Finduilas ease a curious hand up Glaurung's wrist. A maid in an ancient grove, honoring what trees—or was it only that she had made her appointment, with some hours to spare? She had come to hunt. The great worm for her merlin. Let it only, lightly, stir from death, and bear away the world.

But in another moment falconer and maid shinnied gracelessly up the bent wrist, and stopped when she was draped above the armored elbow. She was now a little higher up than Niënor, seen across a sweep of air, and she slung herself low against her perch and held out a hand that seemed to signify some restitution, greater than was possible. Niënor's vision shuttered itself, briefly—a shadow revolved—but it couldn't ward off that face any more than it could spare it. Finduilas said, with ritual ardor: “You can do this, you've _done_ it. You have done everything.”

A last patch of dry cloth lay transparent near her knee. Niënor scraped blood and jelly off her left hand's palm, and leaned forward, until she could reach around the bulk of Glaurung's cheek. Her arm hurt; she thought that there was comfort in the scales at her back. But it was a painful stretch, even after she had let go of Gurthang—let it sink sated into its meal.

Her fingers brushed Finduilas's and slid up to grip her wrist. Finduilas pulled, and Niënor leapt, before Niënor could ask if she had the strength to bear her.

What had happened? The water's glare— A lid of stone dropped over that, ashamed. Finduilas's hand gone almost before she'd gripped it. Her feet hit gravel, she pitched forward, scrambled up the slope. She was in the cavern. She landed on her knees in a deep groove that remembered a claw; only there did she feel, running over her body, the wind, the spray, the strain, the creak and upset in her shoulder. It seemed to go for several moveless minutes, though it thinned—the envelope of rush shrank to a fly's profaning drone. She panted, retched. A little drool got on her wrist. She regretted, and yet stroked and secured inside her, that map that her mind had made of her flight, of where the river sank, and the wall skated up weakly.

Finduilas had dismounted from the dragon's leg. She knelt beside Niënor, crowding her from one side. “Burns everywhere, how surprising! These want tending. Did you land well? I couldn't see.” She began to sing. A nostalgically incorrect melody, used with stitches, not a salve. _The wound is red at dusk; bring down the dark. Helluin for my needle, sew the sky into the sea._

Light above and below. The diving, rising stillness of all stars.

“Elbereth,” Finduilas said quite coolly, stroking Niënor's back, “what a difference, to have his scales from my eyes.”

Niënor twisted away and slapped Finduilas. A squawk of mirth. Stricken, the other woman had careened into Glaurung's claw, and now was scrabbling backward, out of range and down the slope. “Níniel!” she cried, laughing. “ _Niënor._ Niënor, dear one, you can kill me tomorrow!” Her wrists crossed over her breast in a protective gesture, which perhaps doubled as restraint—she gulped a few loud breaths, working to tamp back her mouth's curl. Niënor, revolted, thought that she was brave. She wished she had rescued Gurthang from the dragon's blackened socket; she would have shaken it at her friend, just to see her jump.

But the red mark stared on Finduilas's cheek, and after a moment Niënor followed it out, as she might have a lofted torch. At the bottom of the hill, where water was bearing away armfuls of stone, Finduilas stuck out her hand a second time. She said,

“You have slain the Great Worm. You shall be renowned in song. I—have given you a great deal of bad advice. Follow me?”

“Where?”

“Does it matter, for now?”

The cliff's foot edged narrowly from under the debris. Finduilas was smiling at her: not troubled, it seemed, by any peril that loomed, yet hopeful of improvement. She had pressed herself flat against the canyon wall.

Niënor stayed back. There was some warning in her mind that clearly said not to obey. Follow? Ascend? Hadn't she done enough? When she turned far enough to one side, she unearthed, intact, a shape that had been buried in her nearness to it. Glaurung's throat and viper snarl, like a hand thrust groping into the deep.

Once she had struggled to kiss Finduilas. It was strange to still know. Nothing could be further from this, which was the truth: the Taeglin's scream, the ringed discolored buttresses of stone—the vain, parading sun, its hair let down in tresses. A house on a high hill in spring, where Níniel had fidgeted? It would not now admit her; she'd not fit beneath its roof. It must fill up with growth, being abandoned.

At the turn of the same dismissal, she felt a ravening softness toward both of them, then, who had not understood each other. She accepted Finduilas's arm, and let go of it when she needed to steady herself on the rocks. In that fashion they made their way downstream toward Cabed-en-Aras.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was a rough month, but after this there's just a little wrap-up with Finduilas. I hope.


End file.
